Peau d'ane (Jacques Demy, 1970)

 

Jacques Demy’s Peau d’ane might appear to be among the most purest-hearted of films, if one focused only on the tangible pleasure of its inventions – a donkey that excretes gold and jewels, an old woman who coughs up frogs, dresses that look like the weather and the moon and the sun, fairy godmothers, a talking rose; underlying all of this though is a sense of adult mores and anxieties, evidenced in particular by how the plot turns on a father’s incestuous wish to marry his daughter (the film acknowledges that all little girls may at some point express such a wish regarding their fathers, but the sensibility here is plainly pitched beyond such innocent naivete). Like so many mythic narratives, the film would seem arbitrary in its twistedness – why did the route to save the princess from her father’s desire and to deliver her into the arms of her true love have to follow such a highly specific course? – if not for Demy’s unwavering specificity and deliberation, for the sense that the obstacle- and oddity-strewn world here reflects the complexities of our own more earthly strivings (even that fairy godmother is highly fallible, her decisions coloured by some hinted-at romantic grievance against the king). One feels that Demy would have rejected digital trickery even if it had been available to him: such is the tangible sense of delight in, for example, painting the faces and horses and prevailing décor of one kingdom in blue and of another in red, or in the physically very varied casting; he refers to technologies that don’t yet exist in the world of the film (and ultimately even has a helicopter touch down) and has the princess take a puff on a pipe (which duly makes her cough), all of this held in mysteriously perfect balance by the director’s immensely infectious, even if vaguely melancholic, belief.